"The Little Mermaid" (Danish: Den lille havfrue) is a well-known fairy tale by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen about a young mermaid willing to give up her life in the sea and her identity as a mermaid to gain a human soul and the love of a human prince.

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The Little Mermaid dwells in an underwater kingdom with her father (the sea king or mer-king), her grandmother, and her five sisters. Her five sisters are each born one year apart. When a mermaid turns 15, she is permitted to swim to the surface to watch the world above, and when the sisters become old enough, each of them visits the upper world every year. As each of them returns, the Little Mermaid listens longingly to their various descriptions of the surface and of human beings.

When the Little Mermaid's turn comes, she rises up to the surface, sees a ship with a handsome prince, and falls in love with him from a distance. A great storm hits, and the Little Mermaid saves the prince from nearly drowning. She delivers him unconscious to the shore near a temple. Here she waits until a young girl from the temple finds him. The prince never sees the Little Mermaid.

The Little Mermaid asks her grandmother if humans can live forever and if they could breathe under water. The grandmother explains that humans have a much shorter lifespan than merfolks' 300 years, but that when mermaids die they turn to sea foam and cease to exist, while humans have an eternal soul that lives on in Heaven. The Little Mermaid, longing for the prince and an eternal soul, eventually visits the Sea Witch, who sells her a potion that gives her legs in exchange for her tongue (as the Little Mermaid has the most enchanting and beautiful voice in the world). The Sea Witch warns, however, that once she becomes a human, she will never be able to return to the sea. Drinking the potion will make her feel as if a sword is being passed through her, yet when she recovers she will have two beautiful legs, and will be able to dance like no human has ever danced before. However, it will constantly feel as if she is walking on sharp knives and it will feel as though they must be bleeding. In addition, she will only obtain a soul if she finds true love's kiss and if the prince loves her and marries her, for then a part of his soul will flow into her. Otherwise, at dawn on the first day after he marries another woman, the Little Mermaid will die brokenhearted and disintegrate into sea foam.

The Little Mermaid drinks the potion and meets the prince, who is mesmerised by her beauty and grace even though she is mute. Most of all he likes to see her dance, and she dances for him despite suffering excruciating pain. When the prince's father orders his son to marry the neighboring king's daughter, the prince tells the Little Mermaid he will not because he does not love the princess. He goes on to say he can only love the young woman from the temple, who he believes rescued him. It turns out that the princess is the temple girl, who had been sent to the temple to be educated. The prince loves her, and the wedding is announced.

The prince and princess marry, and the Little Mermaid's heart breaks. She thinks of all that she has given up and of all the pain she has suffered. She despairs, thinking of the death that awaits her, but before dawn, her sisters bring her a knife that the Sea Witch has given them in exchange for their long hair. If the Little Mermaid slays the prince with the knife and lets his blood drip on her feet, she will become a mermaid again, all her suffering will end, and she will live out her full life.

However the Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to kill the sleeping prince lying with his bride, and she throws herself into the sea as dawn breaks. Her body dissolves into foam, but instead of ceasing to exist, she feels the sun; she has turned into a spirit, a daughter of the air. The other daughters tell her she has become like them because she strove with all her heart to obtain an immortal soul. She will earn her own soul by doing good deeds and she will eventually rise up into the kingdom of God.

"The Little Mermaid" was written in 1836, and first published by C.A. Reitzel in Copenhagen 7 April 1837 in Fairy Tales Told for Children. First Collection. Third Booklet. 1837. (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Samling. Tredie Hefte. 1837.). The story was republished 18 December 1849 as a part of Fairy Tales. 1850. (Eventyr. 1850), and again 15 December 1862 as a part of Fairy Tales and Stories. First Volume. 1862. (Eventyr og Historier. Første Bind. 1862.).[1]

Some scholars consider the last sequence with its happy ending to be an unnatural addition. Jacob Bøggild and Pernille Heegaard point out that:

One of the crucial aspects which any interpretation must confront is the final sequence of the tale, in which the little mermaid, against all odds, is redeemed from immediate damnation and accepted into the spiritual sphere, where the "daughters of the air" reside. In this, she is apparently promised the "immortal soul", which it has been her main motivation to obtain — along with the prince, of course. This ending has baffled critics because the narrative that precedes it points rather to a tragic conclusion than to a happy one.

The working title of the story was 'Daughters of the Air'.[3] The daughters of air say they can earn souls simply by doing three hundred years' worth of good deeds, but Andersen later revised it to state that all this depends upon whether children are good or bad.[citation needed] Good behavior takes a year off the maidens' time of service while bad behavior makes them weep and a day is added for every tear they shed. This has come under much criticism from scholars and reviewers; one commenter writing "This final message is more frightening than any other presented in the tale. The story descends into the Victorian moral tales written for children to scare them into good behavior." P. L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins and noted folklore commentator, says, "But a year taken off when a child behaves and a tear shed and a day added whenever a child is naughty? Andersen, this is blackmail. And the children know it and say nothing. There's magnanimity for you."[3][4]

In 1961, Shirley Temple Theatre broadcast a television version of "The Little Mermaid", starring Shirley Temple as the Mermaid.

"Coralina: La Doncella del Mar" starring Dyanik Zurakowska is the first segment of the 1966 Spanish anthology film Fantasia...3.

In 1966 the story appeared in the live action/stop-motion animated movie "The Daydreamer (film)" produced by Rankin/Bass. It centers on a young Hans Christian Andersen (played by Paul O'Keefe) and features the voices of Burl Ives as Father Neptune, Hayley Mills as The Little Mermaid, and in what would be her last film role Tallulah Bankhead is the voice of the Sea Witch.

On 28 July 2007, the premiere of Lior Navok's version for actress, two pianos and chamber ensemble/orchestra.[7]

The Russian movie Rusalka (2007) by Anna Melikyan is a modern-day adaptation, set in Russia.[8]

On January 10, 2008, the stage version of the Disney film opened on Broadway. The music in the play is by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken were also the composing and song writing team for the Disney original film.

Producers using the software Vocaloid have made two songs based on The Little Mermaid. One is sung by Luka Megurine and is called 人魚姫/Ningyo Hime (The Little Mermaid). The other is sung by Miku Hatsune, Luka Megurine, Meiko and Kaito and is called リトマメ / Rito Mame (Little Mermaid).

In the book "The Mermaid's Madness (2010) by Jim C. Hines the Mermaid is named Lirea, and she is on a quest of revenge on the human prince who denied her advances, having been driven insane due to a side-effect of her transformation and a plan of her grandmother to use her as a means of granting the merfolk true souls (Although Lirea's younger sister argues that the belief that they do not have souls is based around superstition rather than fact).

Japanese visual kei band LM.C's track titled "Ningyo No Namida" (Literally "Tears of the Mermaid") is based loosely on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid".

In 2013 Adapt Theatre Productions, a small fringe-theatre production company located in Chicago, Illinois, premiered an adaptation of the story from the perspective of the little mermaid's sisters, who have kidnapped the story's Prince to judge his compassion for their deceased sister. The play, titled "Below", was written in blank verse by actor/playwright Lane Flores.

On November 3, 2013, a character named Ariel with a background that parallels that of Andersen's Little Mermaid became a recurring character on ABC's Once Upon a Time. She debuted in the sixth episode of the third season entitled "Ariel". She is portrayed by actress JoAna Garcia Swisher and unlike most of the other characters in the show does not have a counterpart in the series' fictional town of Storybrooke .

In 2013 the video game The Wolf Among Us by Telltale Games has a character in it named Nerissa. The main protagonist meets her in the second episode where she introduces herself and says that people know and used to call her as the Little Mermaid.

In 2013 there was a live-action made-for-TV German adaptation, Die kleine Meerjungfrau, directed by Irina Popow and starring Zoe Moore.

Blind Tiger, a London based Actor Musician theatre company, will premiere a new theatrical version of The Little Mermaid focusing on the true story of Hans Christian Andersen's influences when creating the fairytale. The show will open in December 2013 at the prestigious Riverside Studios[11]

The seventh game of the series Dark Parables, The Little Mermaid and the Purple Tides, puts a spin in the tale. The royal family of a king and his five daughters are cursed for betraying The Sea Goddess and binding her to the kingdom. The curse sinks the kingdom and turns the king into a man and crab hybred creature and his daughters into mermaids, thus binding them to the seas as she is to their kingdom. The way to break the curse is to collect the sacred orbs and use them with the staff to free The Sea Goddess.

The statue was commissioned in 1909 by Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of Carlsberg, after he had been fascinated by a ballet about the fairytale. The sculptor Edward Eriksen created the statue, which was unveiled on 23 August 1913. His wife, Eline Eriksen, was the model. It has been severely vandalized several times.[15]

In May 2010, it was moved from its Copenhagen harbor emplacement for the first time ever, for transport to Expo 2010 in Shanghai where it remained until October 20, 2010. In the Disney version of The Little Mermaid when Ariel is sitting on top of the rock looking longingly at Prince Eric, she is in exactly the same position that the statue is in.